City Bakery is located at 407 E 5th St. in Des Moines. / Mary Willie/Des Moines Register

Review: City Bakery (3.5 stars out of 5 — worth a visit to highly recommended)

Not every luncheonette needs to be affiliated with an artisanal bakery to be good, but it helps. Such is the case with City Bakery, a small sit-down in the East Village.

City Bakery is an off­shoot of La Mie, the award-garnering bakery by Joe Logsdon. There, breakfast and lunch are packed-house affairs where it’s not uncommon to have fewer seats on hand than custom­ers wanting to sit down. Fortunately, City Bakery is rarely so crowded.

Located where Bagni di Lucca used to be before it closed and across the street from the Blazing Saddle, the big-windowed eatery is simple with few frills (some might find it cold, although flowers on the tables brighten things up a little). At the front end, you’ll find a display case with pizzas, sandwiches and pastries, and a counter to place your order. Guests grab their own silverware and napkins and seat themselves; efficient servers shuttle out the food when it’s ready.

The menu is as spare as the dining room. There are breakfasty nibbles like oatmeal, flaky pastries, eggs every which way, and thick bagel sandwiches that you can order with scram­bled eggs, avocado, lox or ham. They also serve yogurt and fresh fruit if you want to keep it light. And to drink, plenty of juice, tea and excellent French press coffee.

But to date, I know the place mainly for its lunch. On the menu there are just a few categories: sandwiches, pizzas, salads and the somewhat ungainly titled protein salads. The latter, priced at $8.95 each, are greens served with some sort of seafood protein: crab (real crab, mind you), tuna or salmon.

Intriguing, but I inev­itably get seduced by the siren song of carbs in the form of bread layered with meat and cheese. This “decision” is made even easier because there are premade sandwiches in the counter case that are visible as you queue to order, and they look so good wrapped in wax paper, like edible Christmas presents.

It might go without saying but I’ll say it anyway lest you blow a chance for something delicious: Do not forget to ask that your sandwich be heated in one of the pizza ovens in the back. The blazing heat takes the bread from chewy-good to crispy-great in seconds and my ham-and-cheese ($5) was amazing for it.

In between bites, I enjoyed sips of a bang-up cream of mushroom soup ($3.50 for a generous cup).

And in case you fall in love with the focaccia (as I did), you can buy a loaf of it there for $5 (as I did) and try to replicate that gorgeous sandwich at home (as I did).

The pizza is good, too, with a substantive crust, unlike those wimpy cracker-crust pizzas all too common in town. No, City Bakery’s crust is chewy but with a crispness to the edges that’s satisfying, and the ratio of crust to toppings is just right.

I had a slice of the colorful pesto-sausage ($6) with a simple carrot strip-garnished side salad, and the dish­washer would have been hard-pressed to find even just one crumb left on my plate.